CHAPTER 5
The Medieval ballad
Much of medieval literature is poetry. A popular genre was metrical romances, mainly translated
from French models. They consisted of tales in verse about chivalry, love and all sorts of wonders.
These tales came from three main sources: France (the court of Charlemagne), Rome (classical
stories, such as the conquest of Troy) and Britain (the story of King Arthur and his knights).
One of the most important features of medieval poetry is the development of popular ballads,
produced anonymously and sung with or without accompaniment or dance. They were transmitted
orally and written down between the 13th and 14th century. They were collected and published by
Bishop Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765.
The popular ballads are composed of short stanzas of two or four lines, usually rhyming ABCB,
each stanza contains the repetition of word or lines, it is called refrain and helped the memorization
of the text, they can contain a mixture of dialogue and narration and presents the narrative as a
series of flash. There are many supernatural characters like speaking animals, fairies and ghost and
the man can have magic abilities, and they are not described physically and psychologically.
There are four themes of ballad:
1. Ballad of Magic: about supernatural characters
2. Border ballads: about the rivalry between the English and the Scottish people
3. Ballads of love and domestic tragedy
4. Ballads of outlaws, with the cycle of Robin Hood.
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